Ratings

The Apocalyptic Game About Penguins; The title kinda sums it up. Mad scientist doctor Glowenko is planning to take on the world with an army of bio-engineered cybernetic penguins. One of the penguins, codenamed Pablo, doesn't like the idea and escapes, only to find himself fighting against the whole clone penguin army, lead by Pedro, another cyber-penguin. The fate of the world is in Pablo's... er... flippers!

TAGAP is a 2-D platformer shoot-em-up, but it plays more like a first-person-shooter than traditional genre game; Keyboard is for movement while guns are handled with mouse. Speaking of weapons, there are plenty to choose from; Uzis, rocket launchers, plasma guns and even combat vehicles. And you'll need them all against endless waves for zombie penguins, security robots and sentry turrets.

But TAGAP isn't just about penguins and guns, but also about pills. There are four different pills that are rewarded for in-game achievements, like hi-scores and killing spree combos. The color-coded drugs have different effects and side effects. As a result gameplay keeps switching from trippy slow-motion to fast-forward chaos - and back!

TAGAP uses OpenGL effects arsenal for 2-D presentation of slightly naive style, resulting slick, anarchistic presentation easiest described as Mario-meets-Doom. Also featured are built-in level editor and thoroughly-documented TAGAP_Script scripting system. TAGAP: The Apocalyptic Game About Penguins is freeware. It's the debut game of Penguin Development Team, a duo of Finnish hobbyist developers.

Trivia

The game took almost four years to develop, starting in November 2003 as a one-man-project. Jouni Lahtinen joined forces with Petja Heiskanen in early 2004 and the duo went under the alias Penguin Development Team.

The game cost about 2000 Euros to make, which was exactly 2000 Euros over the budget. Nearly all the money was spent on software and hardware.

TAGAP was originally five levels long instead of the released ten, while the last five were meant to become a post-release expansion pack. However, since five levels felt ultimately too short in game testing, the expansion pack was made part of the game itself.

Project lead Jouni Lahtinen is a huge fan of id Software's DOOM-games and TAGAP pays homage to them several times. For instance, in early office level the names on office booths are the names of Doom marine as seen in books, original designs and Doom movie (the character in Doom was never officially named in the game).

TAGAP has many inside jokes scattered throughout the game, most of them being industry insides. For example one Tokyo ad advertises "forthcoming" game "Pimps at Sea", which is the code-name Bungie Studios has used for work-in-progress Halo games.

Game features Dopefish, cult-favorite game character originally created by Tom Hall. Just look at the fishes swimming in Antarctic waters.